Don't worry - we're from the internets. It's going to be alright. :-)

With that phrase the Pirate Bay founders welcome people in Pirate Bay website since yesterday. The court found them guilty and convicted them in one year in prison and 4.5 million dollars in fine.

The founders said that they find it really peculiar that they were found guilty and even more peculiar that they were found guilty of the charge the organized crime. I might add that as everything nowadays they are trying to give it a sense of common crime rather than something different that is new in our times but something old really. The record labels werer doing the same thing with the cassete recording during the 80s...they survved and they are still fat ugly and greedy.

The founders declared that they do not have the money to pay the "damages" but even if they did they would rather burn it and would not even give the court and record labels the ashes.

This is what a criminal looks like

As support for The Pirate Bay people on trial, a site was created where you can upload your photo and declare that you are a "criminal" because you share movies, music and other files.

So far more than 1000 people have uploaded photos of themselves!

Pirate Bay trial about to start

The people behind the operation of the infamous torrent site The Pirate Bay stand trial starting today in Stockholm. Hans Fredrik Neij, Per Svartholm Warg, Peter Kolmisoppi, Carl Lundström face charges for copyright infringement. That is pretty big news. The Pirate Bay has been much more than a place for someone to find pirated software and movies. The four operators run the site by provoking just about everybody in the software and movie industry. The run many anti-DRM campaigns and were promoting freedom of speech and freedom of file transfer on the internet. Pirate Bay started the Spectrial Campaign (Spectacle + Trial) to promote their case.

This is a very fussy trial as the Swedish law is not very clear as to these things. Pirate Bay does not host copyrighted material so the prosecution will have hard time convincing the court they they are breaking any law. De fence is going to stress about other legitimate services that have links to copyrighted material. Any search engine out there is potentially a guilty of copyright infringement by that right as they provide links to copyrighted material.

In slashdot forums there was a particularly great comment about that situation:

Google provides links to infringed copyrighted content. So does Pirate Bay.
Google makes money from advertising. So does Pirate Bay.

OOoooohhhh! But Pirate Bay's advertising is PORN!!

Oh, well. That settles it, then. We find the defendant guil-cup of the charge of accessory to copyright infringement.

The lawyers are turning the trial into a spectacle trying to get as many people as they can interested about the trial in order to get their voice heard. This actually a very good idea since if the trial had no publicity it would probably end up being a "get these people locked up" trial behind closed doors. National Swedish television has announced that they are going to stream live from the courtroom. For anybody that does not speak Swedish their is even going to be a twitter translated broadcast.

UPDATE

50% of the charges have been dropped so far. Major win for defence in the 2nd day of the trial.

Check out the photos from the press conference and the supporters outside the court.